I know how to modifiy the quick acces toolbar, but can you just remove or turn it off completely? One of the guys, who  'Forrest Gump's' his way through autocad, did some figiting and turned it off on his machine. We discovered that Autocad 2009 started performing operations quicker. It also improved closing and Loading the software. But as in all great discovers, the guy has no clue how he did it.

That was the only thing I was able to do. But why co-worker was able to get it to disappear completely. Under options/profiles, if you switch to a random profile and press the apply button. The quick access bar disappears. then if you switch the profile back it remains gone, that is until you assign a workspace in the workspace toolbar. At that time the quick access bar re-appears.

The advantage to not having the quick access bar, is that Autocad 2009 software loads and closes faster. Also, the last file you have open closes quicker. It seems to increase the speed which you can move between files.